I’d have to say Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year. I love paranormal romance, decorating the house with spooky webbing, hanging creepy spiders on the house and laying various bloody body parts around the ‘grave yard’ on the front hill. But overall, this month gives me great inspiration for my writing. Sure, there are loads of gore-fest movies out there with hack ’em slash ’em themes, but those are not my ideal movie to watch. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy a good scare – after my heart has calmed enough so I stop shrieking. I love dark romance, where the immortal is the brooding kind and thinks they’re eternally damned for what they are, and then an innocent woman finds them and somehow changes their inner angst into an internal love he just can’t do with out. I love how the Sci Fi channel has 31 days of Halloween on their station.

I’ve done a lot of research on writing, the craft, what makes for a great romance novel, what sells, what doesn’t, how to get published, and how to create a great query letter. One specific sentence struck me, and stuck with me, through all my research. It takes, on average, seven years for a writer to become published.

Seven years is a very long time, in my opinion. I’ve learned a lot in the last four years on my adventures in writing. If a writer has a game plan, then they hopefully won’t need to take that long to get published. Start back with the basics. Take a few classes. Savvy Authors has a great variety of classes offered on a regular basis and are priced quite reasonably. When they say that you can literally punctuate yourself to a contract, I believe that to be absolutely true. At the very least, the agent or publisher will really read what you submit as long as your submission content is grammar and spelling free.

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https://mandicasey.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/hello-world/#commentsMon, 26 Sep 2011 00:21:44 +0000http://mandicasey.wordpress.com/?p=1Continue reading →]]>Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.